Church Unity And the Life of God
Harry Emerson Fosdick said monogamy wasn't the view that a man or woman should have only one husband or wife at a time. He said monogamy is a man and woman so loving one another that all their lives they don't want to love anyone else in the same way so they get married. That gets to the heart of it. The formal definition is useful, maybe in some ways indispensable but it isn't the heart of the matter. So it is with church unity. Church unity isn't the proposal that a body of believers should think essentially the same things, practice essentially the same ordinances and liturgy and live a similar lifestyle. It's a body of people who congratulate one another that they have been called into the one Body of Jesus Christ and by God's Spirit set themselves together as brothers and sisters to make war in God's name against all that fragments and divides.Church unity is a lifestyle and that lifestyle prizes virtues that make for unity and peace. Perhaps gentleness and humility, patience and forbearance all wrapped up in and being part of love are the virtues especially called on to face the long haul and the ceaseless work involved in protecting and nurturing church unity. And since the Jewish texture is everywhere seen in this epistle (see especially the "berakah" opening in 1:3) maybe we should allow the Hebrew "hesed" to shape our understanding of the Greek "agape" (love) here. If we do, wouldn't it stress even more the community nature of the commitment to love since the Hebrew term has that marked "community love" texture to it? Whatever our conclusion on that, humility is love refusing to strut and remembering that its business is to give itself for others. Meekness (gentleness) is love keeping its rights under control; it is love, pleased to show the strength to say no to itself.
Patience is love going the distance with peevish and narrow hearts and forbearance is love with the durability to put up with prolonged and needless opposition.
More to the point, these virtues are the proclamation of the life of God. Christians aren't called to mere virtue (however fine that may be). They are called to be imitators of God (5:1-2). But which "God"? Is there a vaguer word in the English language? It isn't the isolated God of Islam who appears to be stripped of everything but naked will or the god of any other eastern pantheon whose full careers are better told when children aren't present. He is not even the true God of the Old Testament who had not as yet fully revealed himself. The Christians were called to imitate the God of their Old Testament parents as he had now revealed himself. Israel's ancient Shema is reworked by Paul here in Ephesians 4:4-6 and given a "Trinitarian" slant (and more obviously in 1 Corinthians 8:4-6 where we see a Christological thrust). To live in the image of God, then, involves living in the image of the God who has shown himself to us as Father, Son and Spirit. It is to live in the image of the one true God who has existed in eternal holy communion between the Father and the Son in and through the Holy Spirit. It is that kind of life these Christians share and it is that life they are called to live out. So church unity is and images the unity of the Spirit who has eternally been the means and medium of fellowship in the "land of the Trinity". The unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace involves more than being nice people going to nice churches and being nice to other nice people.
The Christian's virtue is more than mere morality--it is "gospeling". It is proclaiming the truth about the person and passion of God, the crucified God who came to us in and as Jesus Christ. And church unity is human community that is divinely created and shaped by the divine reality that created it. All true, yet it's more than the horizontal result of work done by a benevolent God who keeps his distance, it is actual communion with that holy and benevolent God and it is that vital union with God that makes human communion possible.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, theabidingword.com.